Even if all Trump accomplishes is most of the above – and with control of both Houses, he will – our economy will take off like a rocket. This is patently obvious to everyone, or at least everyone over forty not fed on communist / socialist economics as a necessary component of social justice at school. As CNBC announced today “The election of Donald Trump has brought with it a surge in optimism in the United States over the economy and stocks not seen in years.”

What are the progs to do? They can’t stop Trump with Republicans in control of both Houses. Nor can they allow the demos to come to believe that Trump is succeeding where they failed utterly. So they are going to try the next best thing. They will try to convince Americans that any any economic improvement achieved by Trump is owed to Obama.

There is a new petition on Change.org asking Obama to become House Speaker in 2018. Not only is it almost charming in its lack of awareness, it is also a reminder that the Left never gives in or gives up. When the personal and the political are the same, when even brushing your teeth is a political act, you’re going to be committed to political activity 24/7.

The petition opens by reminding potential signers that they’re now living with the horror of total Republican control. Worse, Leftist activity, including “protests and lawsuits are not going to be enough to stop Trump, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Sam Alito, and company from rolling back decades of progress virtually overnight, particularly if rank-and-file Republicans feel no pressure to dissent from Trump’s party line.” That reference to “decades of progress” is a funny one, because as best as I can tell, Trump is determined to roll back only 8 years of “progress,” which doesn’t even equal a single decade.

What you’re seeing here is something I’ve written about frequently, which is the Lefts’ belief that the 1950s are always lurking just around the corner with Jim Crow (a purely Democrat initiative), back alley abortions, gays deeply closeted and, perhaps worst of all, men and women playing their assigned gender roles. The fact that Trump was considered a benefactor to the black community before he ran as a Republican or that his initiatives towards gays and sex roles seem to be limited to blocking the federal government from telling schools to ignore biological gender or forcing nuns to buy birth control seems to have eluded J. Q. Adams, the petition’s author.

Panicked at the thought of all these inchoate horrors, Adams asks, “What can be done?”

Well, Adams has a “long-shot” idea. We know it’s a long-shot not only because he says so, but because, after accusing the GOP of gerrymandering Democrats out of federal existence, he admits that it may not have a lot of momentum after what he calls, with magnificent understatement, “the Democrats’ recent difficulties in midterm elections.” Those “recent difficulties” see Republicans with the greatest hold over America at both the state and federal level in more than ninety years.

Adams is a man of faith, however. He believes that, Democrats can block Trump’s momentum, if they can just pick up “24 seats to win the House and 3 to win the Senate.” To do this, after failing in 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016, all that Democrats need to do is create “a powerful national message” letting Republicans know that they’re on the hook for everything from “Trump’s bigotry and misogyny, to his trampling of cherished freedoms and democratic norms, to his dangerous foreign policy, and to his plans to privatize Medicare, cut taxes for the rich, take away 20 million Americans’ health insurance, abolish workers’ right to organize and women’s right to choose, and allow climate change to continue unabated.”

With that kind of agenda, Adams concludes that there’s only one man for the job: Barack Obama!

I think I’ve come up with a universal theory of voter fraud, one that explains Obama’s (to me) inexplicable victory in 2012 as well as (to the Progressives and #NeverTrumpers) Trump’s equally inexplicable victory in 2016. This theory is not to be taken seriously, but I still like how comprehensive it is.

We start with the fact that Obama won in 2012. This was rather amazing considering that the economy was dormant, unemployment was still high, the Benghazi attack showed a resurgent Al Qaeda, the public was becoming aware of the extent of Obama’s and the Dems’ lies when it came to Obamacare, the War in Afghanistan was escalating, Syria was devolving into the worst kind of civil war while Obama quibbled about red lines, Obama had promised Putin more “flexibility,” and racial hatred was flaring in ways not seen since the Civil Rights Movement.

And yet Obama won. The polls, which cannot be trusted, claim that it’s just because voters like Obama. I don’t see it, so there must be another explanation for his victory, especially given the resurgence of the Republican brand outside of the White House.

Part One of my universal theory is that Obama won in 2012 because he had two advantages over Romney: (1) a superb “get out the vote” infrastructure in urban areas and (2) in those same urban areas, a superb “get out the illegal vote” infrastructure. This second machine reached out to all the urban illegal immigrants, dead voters, felons, and unregistered or irresponsible millennials — that is, all the people who make up the Democrat cohort and who would vote heavily in urban pockets during federal elections, if they could vote legally, if they weren’t dead, or if they weren’t sitting around in a pot haze and clinging to their safe spaces.

I’m leaving soon for the airport, but wanted to make two quick points about government corruption and minority rule before it becomes too difficult to write.

Government corruption. It was easy for Obama to corrupt the Department of Justice. He simply put in place people who had no respect for the rule of law and, instead, ran things purely through a political filter.

Sadly, un-corrupting the DOJ (not to mention other government agencies that became equally corrupted) will be a more difficult task. It’s not just a matter of cleaning out the bad employees and replacing them with good ones. The corrupt employees created vested interests, and those who benefitted from the corruption will fight tooth and nail to protect those interests — and they’ll do so, moreover, by accusing the new broom of itself being politicized.

As a private citizen said on Facebook (and I won’t name him lest he be harassed), it was the Left that politicized everything. Further, that writer pointed out that by doing so the Left forced everyone to have an opinion about everything, whether they wanted to or not. I’ll add that this same politization means that even the act of returning to the rule of law is a political one that the Left will viciously challenge.

This is it: the countdown to learning whether Obama will have been successful in fundamentally changing America or whether we can still resurrect something from the wreckage. This is an umbrella post with a variety of articles that touch upon the election, America’s culture wars, politics generally, the Middle East, and other interesting things. The only thing I don’t have here, because Assange keeps promising but not delivering, is a single smoking-gun document that hands Hillary her “go directly to jail” card. Instead, each Wikileak tranche, while confirming Hillary’s and the Democrat’s core corruption and self-interest, fails to be the jail card.

The #NeverTrumpers still have time to reconsider. Some of the people I admire most are #NeverTrumpers. I don’t understand them on the issue and they don’t understand me, but it’s ultimately a good thing that we’re not Democrat herd animals but, instead, have independent minds. Still. . . . Roger Simon makes what seems to me to be a very compelling argument that, no matter how flawed Trump is (and he is very flawed), Hillary will be infinitely worse. We’ll be plagued by a corrupt media, the culture wars on steroids, a level of corruption unimagined in American politics, the constitutional risks of a president under FBI investigation, and the horrors of Hillary’s manifest incompetence.

Trump offers a return to “normalcy.” Peter Thiel, whose gayness the Gay “Baby, I was born this way” Mafia now denies because he supports Trump, made an important point, which is that Trump represents a return to the norm. What the Left offers is no longer even remotely normal. We’ve spent the last eight years in Looking Glass Land, and people are turning to Trump to back away from Progressive insanity.

Hillary’s terrible incompetence. One of the things that’s come through loud and clear with the Wikileaks is that Hillary and Company are the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. They’re terrible at what they do, and they get away with it only because they have a media infrastructure that vouches for them (“She has a vagina so, leave Hillary alone!!“). And of course, because that are the bridge connecting money (no matter how dirty or anti-American) to American power and assets.

This is almost certainly untrue, un-sourced rumor, but I couldn’t pass it up. Please keep my caveat in mind: There is no reason to believe that this post, which has the NYPD saying that the Weiner dox are much worse than anyone imagined, is true. However, I can’t resist linking to it to the extent it claims to represent unnamed sources in the NYPD and alleges this kind of stuff:

Yesterday I wrote a post saying that Trump is coming under the same attack that Palin did, not particularly because of their politics or accomplishments but because in the minds of the self-styled elite that populates Progressivism, Trump and Palin “are not one of us.” For people who value form infinitely more than substance there can be no greater indictment than failing “virtue signaling.” Today, I’m asking myself whether Obama read my post.

With the presidential debate almost upon us, this is the right time to think about the two candidates and America’s political situation.

The years to come will demand a strong president. The New York Times wrote an utterly ludicrous endorsement of Hillary Clinton, one that should be in the dictionary next to the phrase “damning with faint praise.” It basically concedes that she’s done nothing of note and says that the main reason to vote for her is that she’s been around a long time and holds the correct points of view.

While I disagree with the NYT’s conclusion (“vote for Hillary”), the sub-text that the NYT tries so hard to hide is accurate: Hillary is weak, not just physically, but also when it comes to accomplishments. To date, all she’s really done is use her husband’s fame to ascend the political ladder.

“It’s unfair to ask for Hillary both to play traffic cop with Trump, make sure that his lies are corrected, and also to present her vision for what she wants to do for the American people,” Robby Mook said on ABC’s “This Week.”

When pressed by host George Stephanopoulos that that’s “what a debater is supposed to do,” Mr. Mook said this case is “special.”

“Well, I think Donald Trump’s special,” Mr. Mook said. “We haven’t seen anything like this. We normally go into a debate with two candidates who have a depth of experience, who have rolled out clear, concrete plans, and who don’t lie, frankly, as frequently as Donald Trump does.”

“So we’re saying this is a special circumstance, a special debate, and Hillary should be given some time to actually talk about what she wants to do to make a difference in people’s lives,” he continued. “She shouldn’t have to spend the whole debate correcting the record.”

Think about Mook’s statements as you contemplate the fact that the American people, as much as anything, are watching to see how the candidates perform under pressure. Hillary’s team has already conceded that she cannot perform at all under pressure. How’s that trait going to work out when Hillary is in a face-off with Russia or Iran?

And there will be face-offs. As Victor Davis Hanson chillingly details, Obama’s eight years in office will have left us with a scarily dangerous world, one that requires strong American leadership if we are to survive in something resembling our historic self:

Russia has been massing troops on its border with Ukraine. Russian president Vladimir Putin apparently believes that Europe is in utter disarray and assumes that President Obama remains most interested in apologizing to foreigners for the past evils of the United States. Putin is wagering that no tired Western power could or would stop his reabsorption of Ukraine — or the Baltic states next. Who in hip Amsterdam cares what happens to faraway Kiev?

Iran swapped American hostages for cash. An Iranian missile narrowly missed a U.S. aircraft carrier not long ago. Iranians hijacked an American boat and buzzed our warships in the Persian Gulf. There are frequent promises from Tehran to destroy either Israel, America, or both. So much for the peace dividend of the “Iran deal.”

North Korea is more than just delusional. Recent nuclear tests and missile launches toward Japan suggest that North Korean strongman Kim Jong-un actually believes that he could win a war — and thereby gain even larger concessions from the West and from his Asian neighbors.

Radical Islamists likewise seem emboldened to try more attacks on the premise that Western nations will hardly respond with overwhelming power. The past weekend brought pipe bombings in Manhattan and New Jersey as well as a mass stabbing in a Minnesota mall — and American frustration.

Europe and the United States have been bewildered by huge numbers of largely young male migrants from the war-torn Middle East. Political correctness has paralyzed Western leaders from even articulating the threat, much less replying to it.

Neither of the candidates has touched upon these issues, and the president has disengaged entirely. Their disengagement, though, doesn’t prevent these issues from touching the US, the only question being whether that happens sooner or later. VDH, the historian, likens this summer to the one that predated WWI when nobody imagined the “the war to end all wars” was waiting to explode.

Regarding Trump, he hasn’t touched upon these issues because he understands that they’re not persuasive. That is, they’ll scare American voters, but it’s unlikely that they’ll make them more likely to vote for Trump. North Korea is something one tut-tuts about, but it doesn’t play well in the ballot box. Also, to the extent he’s not a policy wonk, if he doesn’t have briefings from quality advisers, he risks falling into media traps about the minutiae of these issues (as happened to Gary Johnson, when he totally blanked on Aleppo).

Despite his deliberate decision not to go there when it comes to the post-Obama world, the reality is that whatever else one thinks of Trump, “weak” is not one of the adjectives that comes to mind. Aggressive, persuasive, agile, manipulative, adaptable — those are all good adjectives to describe Trump. None describe Hillary.

So at the end of this last summer before the next world war, who would you rather have in the White House? The woman too physically frail and mentally rigid to participate in the usual presidential debate or the man who is sharp as a sword and as crazy as a fox (and who actually likes America)?

I think I’m in love. No, really. I’d never heard of James T. Harris before watching the video I embedded below but I’m an instant groupie. I love it when people use plain English to cut through the lies and the misdirection in order to reach core, principled issues that are far deeper and more important than skin color or gender identity — and that’s exactly what Harris does. He bills himself as “The beautiful man” who serves “cocoa conservativism” daily and, so far, I have to agree with his self-identification.

The starting point for the rant is the speech Obama made to the Congressional Black Caucus telling them — and blacks across America — that blacks need to vote for Hillary to preserve Obama’s legacy. Harris takes wonderful umbrage at all the many ideas that Obama bundled in that demand, from race relations, to the quality of black lives during the Obama administration, to the Black Lives Matter movement, and much more.

By the way, Harris’s wonderful rant has struck a nerve. Harris posted it on Facebook this past Monday and, in just seven days it’s had ten and quarter million (you read that right — ten and a quarter million) views, along with hundreds of thousands of likes and shares:

The older of my two dogs is very high-strung and she got so frightened by the wind that carried the fog in tonight that I’ve had to sequester her and me in my home office so that Mr. Bookworm, who needs to get up for work tomorrow, can sleep. She shows no signs of settling, so I’m blogging.

No matter how you slice it, Trump is the less risky gamble. Writing in the Claremont Review of Books, Publius Decius Mus quite graphically presents the issue that I have been arguing all summer:

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

Precisely. Trump, with all his flaws, is better than Hillary. Up until a few months ago, one could argue that Hillary is just another garden-variety Leftist and that the American republic will survive despite her.

That’s all changed now. Knowing as we do of her extraordinary corruption — whether in running the State Department as a Pay-for-Play profit center for herself, her husband, and her daughter, or deliberately exposing all of America’s state secrets to try to hide her gross malfeasance — electing her to the presidency means that America has fully embraced banana republic status.

In the wake of a Hillary victory, thanks to Comey and the American voters (including all those #NeverTrumpers), there will no longer be a rule of law in America that applies equally to all citizens. We will in one fell swoop have destroyed a legal system that goes back 1215 when England first put into writing in the Magna Carta a policy saying that no one, not even a king, is above the law. As of now, Hillary and her cronies are above the law and it will be a disaster if the American people put their imprimatur on that utterly corrupt, anti-democratic principle.

One more thing: As Publius Decius Mus explains, Hillary’s been wrong about every single policy stance she’s ever taken (including the ones where she’s changed her stance repeatedly according to the latest poll data), while Trump, in his fumbling, bumbling way, has been right about all of the most important policy issues facing America. So maybe he’s not so bad after all.

The Hillary supporters amongst whom I live are thrilled to pieces with the report that 50 GOP “national security experts” have signed a letter calling Trump potentially “the most reckless president in American history.” I certainly understand their concern about putting reckless people in charge of America’s national security. Just think of all the damage a reckless person could do:

A reckless president could deny that radical Islamists are waging war against us and, as part and parcel of that denial, scrub Islam from all national security guidelines. Oh, wait! Both Hillary, during her State tenure, and Obama have already done that.

A reckless president could begin a war without Congress’s approval to kill a national leader who is no longer a threat to America’s interests, destabilizing the region so severely that it becomes a haven for the worst kind of anti-Western terrorists. Oh, silly me! Hillary and Obama have already done that too.

A reckless president could refuse to give proper security to consulates in dangerous regions and then, when danger appears, refuse to send aid and lie about everything after the fact, ending up with the selfish insistence that, once people are dead, it no longer makes a difference what she did. I’m talking to you, Hillary.

A reckless president could withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq without leaving a force behind to secure a hard-won victory, allowing Iraq to become completely destabilized and turning it into another haven for the worst kind of anti-Western terrorists. Oh! Don’t tell me — Obama and Hillary already did that, didn’t they?

A reckless president could invite tens of thousands of people from a Middle Eastern region rife with terrorism to enter the United States, despite acknowledging that America currently has no way to vet them for terrorist ties nor is it making any effort to fulfill the core government obligation of protecting against infectious diseases. I did it again, didn’t I? Obama already did that, didn’t he? And Hillary promises to continue that course of action, right?

Another false narrative, because the actual footage shows that Trump was not mocking a reporter (see link at bottom of this post)

Up until 2008, although the media was already reliably Leftist, it still kept up the pretense that it was objective. In every election year, it interspersed its cheerleading for the Democrat candidate and put-downs for the Republican candidate with occasional stories that praised the Republican with faint damns, and that damned the Democrat with faint praise. In that far distant time, journalists still spoke about reporting as if their profession required them to relay facts instead of spinning them.

Everything changed in 2008. With the first black Democrat candidate for president, the Leftist collective that is the American media felt that it had a moral imperative to ensure that Obama won. It began the righteous charge, therefore, by destroying Hillary during the primaries (clearly, a “first sort of black president” trumped a “first sort of woman president”).

Then, having performed that job, the media turned its collective wrath on McCain, even while singing endless paeans to the wonder that was Obama, the magic negro, the racial healer, the smartest person in every room, and the guy with the great crease in his pants. The media was so committed to its mission that it ignored entirely basic reporting obligations, such as determining whether Obama’s academic record supported his much-vaunted intellect; whether his professional career suggested a competent man; whether his Christian faith comported with core Christian doctrine or was just a weekly anti-American grievance gathering; and whether his associations throughout his life were of the type (anti-American, anti-semitic, anti-white, etc.) that might give ordinary voters some concern.

Indeed, rather than reporting on Obama, the media did the opposite: anyone who did good, old-fashioned legwork to learn more about the man who wanted to take the helm in America was a racist. If you wished to avoid that repellant label, you took Obama at face value, reserving your reportorial skills for destroying Sarah Palin (whose life, unlike Obama’s, was already an open book).

Once Obama became president, it was pretty obvious that the media had oversold him. He wasn’t a racial healer, he wasn’t the smartest man in the room, he wasn’t a competent manager, he wasn’t a committed Christian, and he was still palling around with anti-American activists, although his palling around now took him all over the world. He elevated Muslim and illegal immigrant concerns over American rights, was (and is) hostile to the Constitution, hated Israel, lied like a rug about Obamacare, and generally was at his best only when he was slow jammin’ on late night talk shows. Everything else . . . meh, not so much.

In 2012, the media did exactly what it had done in 2008. It reported positively on Obama, and negatively on every Republican during the primaries and on Mitt Romney after the primaries. However, possibly nervous about a wholesale repeat of its 2008 campaign for Obama, the media still practice a little bit of reportage that included damning Obama with faint praise, and praising Romney with faint damns. For the most part, though, the media made it clear which candidate it thought should win.

I mistakenly believed in 2012 that the American people, educated by the chasm between the Obama promise and the Obama practice, would have been put wise to the fact that they were not getting actual news (that is, “just the facts”) but were instead on the receiving end of a steady diet of Democrat-party campaign material. Given how bad things were for Democrat players and politics in 2012, I therefore assumed that a savvy public would understand the propaganda and vote Obama out of office. I erred.

While I may have erred in 2012, the media learned its lesson — it can say anything, and it can hide anything, and the uninformed will follow its lead . . . sometimes even as that same credulous public mumbles despairingly that the media is no longer publishing actual, you know, news.

Indeed, the relationship between the public and the media today reminds me of an old cartoon showing a man and a woman sitting at the breakfast table. The man has a newspaper open before him, and says to his wife, “It says here that you shouldn’t believe everything you read.” To which the wife quite naturally responds, “Don’t believe it.”

Of course, having sinned twice and been rewarded, the media is now sinning with over-the-top gusto. No more feeble attempts at even-handedness. Reporters are openly feeding at the Jon Stewart trough. There are no MSM stories about Trump’s success as a businessman, about the people loyal to and respectful of him, about the generous or moral stands he’s taken over the years, or about the fact that his business success shows that he’s actually rather risk-averse, rather than the opposite. Every news report first claims that everything he says is a lie, only to back off from those claims days later, in small print or lost links.

Instead, the media is in a shark-feeding frenzy, with Trump as the chum. Having propped him up during the primaries (“Let’s promote the most unelectable primary candidate for the Republican party”), reporters are going in for the kill. Moreover, they’re going in for the kill with shoddy, dishonest reporting, and they refuse to back down even when proven to have lied. For them, every story about Trump is a successful example of the “Big Lie.”

Meanwhile, when it comes to Hillary, the media is happy to let her vanish for 246 days. They’re happy to report her press releases as news. They’re happy to downplay the fact that she proved to be the greatest national security risk in American history. They’re happy to ignore the fact that she sold out America to fund herself and her husband. They ignore the lies, the physical problems, the mental weirdness, the corruption, the repeated job failures, and all the other stuff that should be on the front page of every paper along with the reporting on Trump.

You’ve notice, I’m sure, that I didn’t put any hyperlinks in the above narrative. Instead, I’m going to link here to a series of articles that prove my point:

Oh, and speaking of Reuters, both Reuters and Getty have almost surreptitiously published photos of Hillary practically being carried up some stairs. That is, the photos are uploaded on their sites, but they haven’t used them in any stories. Unfortunately, Drudge found them anyway:

There’s something very wrong with Hillary and Scott Adams is right to say that the American people should demand to see her health records (and Trump’s too, for that matter).

Honestly, I’m at the point where I’m going to vote for Trump just as an act of hostility to the American media.

Blacks and Muslims should be angry at their criminal cohorts, not at us. In the context of an article about political correctness, Andrew Klavan said something I’ve been struggling to say for some time. He acknowledges that blacks are on the receiving end of much more police activity, something frustrating and insulting to law-abiding blacks, but that’s because the black community’s bad eggs commit a disproportionate amount of American crime. Likewise, because children have big mouths, perfectly nice Muslim kids in school find themselves being called terrorists, reflecting the fact that acts of mass violence all over the world come primarily from their co-religionists. That’s certainly not nice, but Klavan says that law-abiding blacks and Muslims are putting blame in the wrong place:

It seems to me if you are an innocent black person being troubled by the cops, if you are an innocent Muslim under suspicion from your neighbors, the people you should be angry at, the people to blame, are not the people acting on rational suspicion. The people at fault are the bad guys who have drawn that suspicion unfairly onto you.

A black man targeted by the police shouldn’t be angry at the police. He should be angry at the thugs and criminals who look like him and make his race a target. And before Muslims blame non-Muslims for the prejudice against them, maybe they ought to look to — and openly condemn — those Muslims who have given their religion a very bad name indeed.

The problem is prejudice, yes. But it’s the tribal prejudice that says we should blame others before we blame “our own.” “Our own” are the good guys, no matter what race or religion we are.

Someone should read those words out loud at the Republican Party Convention. They’re very important.